Information presentation has taken on various new forms in the information age. Visual presentation through television, print media, and the Internet takes raw information and packages it into, not simply plain text, but a complete multimedia experience by adding visual elements, including bold, colors, font-size, placement formatting, images, animations, video, and the like. Each of these formatting elements are created in order to generate a favorable user interaction with the information being presented. For example, advertising is much more effective using color, images, bold text, sound, and even animations or videos, than printing plain text. A great deal of thought and design work, including examining the psychology of certain colors, shapes, and the like, go into the design of such information presentations. These multi-formatted documents contain the visual as well as the textual information making the entire presentation.
Multi-formatted presentations are typically created by two separated segments of designers: formatting designers, who deal with the technical details of how to present the information; and subject matter exerts (SMEs), who deal with compiling and wording the textual part of the information. Formatting designers are not typically experts in a particular subject matter, while SMEs are also typically not experts in the technical aspects of visual presentation. A great deal of time, and cost is expended on both the formatting designers and the SMEs in creating a single, multi-formatted presentation. However, in typically arrangements, when only small changes to the textual information is necessary, both formatting designers and SMEs are usually needed to effect those small changes. The cost, therefore, is relatively high, compared to the quantity of the changes being made.
An example area in which this problem exists is in the design and maintenance of Web sites. Companies typically use the World Wide Web to disseminate information both internally, to employees and contractors, and externally, to customers and business partners. This information is usually generated by SMEs, who are typically people with expertise in the information domain, but who are not usually technically skilled. In order to publish this information to the Web, or edit the existing information already on a company Internet or Intranet Web site, SMEs typically work with technically skilled Web developers, who generally combine Web coding or computer programming skills and graphics design skills. Skilled Web developers are an expensive resource. Moreover, Web developers may divide the coding and graphics arts expertise into multiple people. In a commercial Web site, information may change often to supply Web viewers the most, up to date information. However, even in the smallest changes, both the Web designer and the SME are often needed to effect the change. Furthermore, because Web developers may divide the coding and graphic arts expertise, certain technical components of the Web site may be have changes pending even though the remaining technical components will not change.
Web sites generally comprise a Web server, that serves the visual and data content to the user's browser many times in a format, such as hypertext markup language (HTML), and a file transfer server, that provides read and write-access to the files that make up the visual and data content of the Web sites. While Web servers and file transfer servers are conceptualized as separate and independent machines, Web servers and file transfer servers are typically only software applications, often times running on the same computer. The underlying Web files are usually stored in memory or storage accessible by the computer, and the Web server and file transfer server applications interact with those files in different ways. Web servers typically allow only read-access to the Web files, compared to the read/write-access allowed by the file transfer servers. Because the file transfer server allows read/write-access to Web files, general users are not typically given access to the file transfer server because changing files through the file transfer server will change how the Web pages are served through the Web server to the accessing browsers. Instead, file transfer server access is generally limited to Web developers or those who have some authority over the Web content. File transfer servers typically run a specific transfer protocol, such as file transfer protocol (FTP), secure FTP (SFTP), or the like. Additionally, the file transfer server may be set up on a local area network (LAN), or the like.
Web development environments and development tools exist to assist the developers both retrieve and edit the underlying files that make up the Web pages. However, it is generally not considered effective to allow the Web designers to code in the textual changes, because the technology underlying a web page typically exceeds their expertise. Moreover, SMEs are also not usually considered for accessing the underlying Web files to update the text, because they are typically non-technical. Therefore, the SME may unwittingly destroy or change some or all of the formatting for which the Web designer spent countless hours designing and implementing.
Solutions to this problem have been attempted, by creating a Web site that reads from a database. SMEs may then have access to the database to update any textual information contained therein, while the formatting of the Web page is preserved. However, this solution generally requires that the Web site be built from scratch using this paradigm, and it commonly limits the SME to entering raw text in a form. Therefore, it is not feasible for the millions of existing Web sites and pages that are not already set up for this means of editing. Absent such customized Web designs, companies are faced with either hiring experts to make even simple changes, not allowing SMEs to edit at all, or giving them access to the entire Web page, which risks the design and integrity of the site.